Mesa mayor: No blank check for business

He explains city policies to Chamber of Commerce

by Gary Nelson - Oct. 12, 2012 10:40 AMThe Republic | azcentral.com

Mesa wants to help businesses succeed, Mayor Scott Smith said this week, but that doesn't mean they will always get what they want.

"What we've learned through this recession is the health of the community is directly connected to the health of its business community," Smith told members of the Mesa Chamber of Commerce on Wednesday. "You cannot have a successful city without having successful businesses."

With that in mind, the former homebuilder said one of his first priorities when taking office four years ago was to cut red tape at City Hall and improve communication between bureaucrats and entrepreneurs.

That effort accelerated this year when the chamber and the city launched a program called Start Up Mesa. Staffers from each organization are virtually embedded in the other to facilitate new and expanding companies.

Even so, Smith said, businesses have to live by the city's rules.

"Government should set standards," he said. "I will never apologize for setting reasonable standards. The problem (in Mesa) is we have not set standards ... so we have allowed substandard to come in."

Within a few years, he said, what is substandard when it was built becomes blight, damaging Mesa's business climate and quality of life.

Smith said he fields frequent complaints from businesses who believe they're not getting a fair chance to deal with the city.

While Mesa tries to buy from local firms, he said, companies need to do their part as well.

It's not reasonable, he said, for a procurement officer "who deals with hundreds of contracts and literally thousands of inquiries every year" to know about every business in town. "You have got to be aggressive in letting the city of Mesa know who you are and what you are and what you have to offer," he said.

Among those in the audience was former U.S. Rep. Matt Salmon, who is running for Congress again this year. Salmon asked Smith what he could do in Washington, if elected, to help cities.

Federal air-quality rules, he said, have come close to shutting down the Valley's construction industry. Every time there's a dust storm local officials have to send the federal government reams of documents proving it was a natural event, he said.

And although federal money is helping to build Mesa's light-rail extension, federal rules have slowed the project, Smith said.

"Our light rail took two years to do an environmental study for a project that's being built down the middle of a four-lane highway," he said. "And all we're doing is taking out the median. ...There's no darter fish. There's no pollywogs. There's no babbling brooks that we're crossing."

Many times, federal bureaucrats at the local and regional levels are the stickiest, rather than those in Washington who may not know what their underlings are up to, the mayor said.

Smith used the meeting to promote the $70 million parks bond package that is on the Nov. 6 ballot, saying most of its proposals came from Mesa residents through the iMesa program.

"This is important for our community because this is what your fellow citizens said was important to them," Smith said. Without that grass-roots buy-in, it's not likely the council would have floated park bonds in a down economy "because politicians tend to be, you might say, risk-averse."

And, Smith said, the pending arrival of four colleges could transform downtown Mesa far more thoroughly than anyone had imagined.

When the four college presidents met in Mesa last month, he said, they brainstormed ways to establish a national model for cooperation among colleges existing in close proximity.

Not only might they share faculty, programs and physical facilities, but they're talking about intercollegiate sports teams that would draw athletes from all four schools and compete under one banner.